But The New Straws Are Made From Paper

I'm old enough to remember when we had to abandon paper grocery sacks for plastic baggies.

At first it we were given a choice, "paper or plastic," and most of us chose the plastic.

Now the paper is very rare.

The reason we were to give up the paper sacks that had been in use for decades was because of the environment.  Paper production was killing the rain forest or something.

Now there's a push to eliminate those plastic bags and change to some sort of reusable cloth.

Cloth bags, which are often a kind of plastic themselves, which are proving to be breeding grounds for all manner of nasty things that will get on your food.

And by the way, the environmentally safe laundry soaps and water saving washing machines don't do a good job of cleaning the cloth shopping bags!

I'm getting sick of things we have to ban while forgetting there was a reason we started using disposable containers in the first place.

I'm thinking that straws are another such thing where doing the "right thing" is ignoring the reason they're made from the materials they are.

I've noticed how many decades of work it took to get a toilet to actually do a good job with 3.5 gallons in the tank instead of 5.  The people who demanded we save water forgot why the standard commode used 5 gallons.  5 gallons was the amount of water needed to reliably work and that number wasn't pulled that number out of someone's ass, it was arrived at empirically.